[HN Gopher] Electronic warfare history of the Battle of the Bulge
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Electronic warfare history of the Battle of the Bulge
Author : aaronsdevera
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-12-29 20:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Another, excellent source for historical use of EW in World War
| II: the book Instruments of Darkness by Alfred Price [1]. In
| fact, the Association of Old Crows, a US professional and
| lobbying organization for EW includes it, as well as several
| others, in their recommended reading section on History [2].
|
| [1]. https://www.amazon.com/Instruments-Darkness-History-
| Electron...
|
| [2]. https://www.crows.org/page/recommendedbooks
| mwattsun wrote:
| Thread unrolled
|
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1475994609549557761.html
|
| Paper mentioned in the last tweet:
|
| The Unseen Fight: USAAF radio counter-measure operations in
| Europe, 1943 to 1945 by William Cahill
|
| https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-op...
| ant6n wrote:
| Thread unrolled without pictures
| mwattsun wrote:
| javascript:(function(){var
| imgs=document.getElementsByTagName("img");for(var
| i=0;i<imgs.length;i++)imgs[i].style.visibility="hidden"}());
|
| Source:
|
| Javascript bookmarklet to hide all images from current
| webpage?
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3623640/javascript-
| bookm...
| [deleted]
| dboreham wrote:
| Recommend R V Jones' book as a "from the horse's mouth" account
| of WWII tech (written in the window after much of the relevant
| material was declassified, but before he died, obviously).
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0033806QY
| smilespray wrote:
| For more R V Jones goodness, watch "The Secret War" from 1977.
| The two first segments, "The Battle of the Beams" and "To See
| for a Hundred Miles" should be of interest, but all of it is
| great, really.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8
|
| Bonus: It includes interviews with Albert Speer.
|
| More info about the series:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_(TV_series)
| Luc wrote:
| Lots about radar and jamming in "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones.
| Also fun to read for its description of all the petty infighting
| that went on.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The fascinating takeaway is the failure of "command". It is
| something we all see every day in companies large and small(ish).
| And it rarely is the fault of "some idiot" - it is just that one
| person cannot attend to all the issues.
|
| Which tends to suggest not to look for better generals, but to
| push the decisions downwards and "outwards" (ie transparency - so
| that everyone has access to all data used to make decisions)
| thatfunkymunki wrote:
| there is a term in use in today's US military - "centralized
| command, decentralized execution" that mostly captures this
| sentiment
| fmajid wrote:
| Then as always flyboys were reluctant to support the grunts doing
| the actual fighting on the ground, just as they are trying to
| kill the A-10 Warthog today.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with the term "penny packet", see this
| article that goes into quite a bit of detail for an introductory
| overview.
|
| https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0610penny/
|
| There are some lessons here (in the OP's submission and the
| discussion about penny packets) for software engineering
| projects.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| TIL: Donald Trump's uncle was the "salesman" for the US / UK
| Electronic Jamming squadron. Life is surprising.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| Nephews are weird. For example, Billy Hitler,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston
| margalabargala wrote:
| This is fascinating and would make for an excellent long-form
| article. Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with
| particularly advanced electronic warfare going on.
|
| It's a shame this is presented as a twitter thread.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| deeviant wrote:
| > It's a shame this is presented as a twitter thread.
|
| I don
|
| 't know what y
|
| ou're talki
|
| <INSERT AD HERE>
|
| ng about. The long form twi
|
| tter format gives natur
|
| <INSERT AD HERE>
|
| al breaks that add
|
| suspense and color to <INSERT AD HERE>
|
| Ok long form twitter is basically what I expect the internet to
| be if I died, went to hell, and started my eternal torment.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with
| particularly advanced electronic warfare going on.
|
| Ehh? At a minimum, WWII was when cryptography and code-breaking
| became popular. The Battle of Midway was an overwhelming
| American victory because the USA effectively hacked the
| Japanese codes and reversed the trap.
|
| Thousands of code-breakers were employed to try to crack the
| Enigma machine, and only one exotic project by Mr. Alan Turing
| (THE Alan Turing, the father of modern computers) was able to
| break it.
|
| ------
|
| While radios existed in WWI, they were still somewhat exotic.
| By WWII, every single tank, ship, and airplane was equipped
| with radios, and those communications were 100% the target of
| many exotic attacks.
|
| England experimented on new forms of Radio, such as RADAR.
| Germany began to use radio-guided missiles (the V1 "Flying
| Bombs" were radio-guided by Morse Code... primitive by today's
| standards but obviously open to electronic attack if you could
| just figure out the codes).
|
| WW2 was the start of electronic warfare on every front. Radio-
| guided weapons, jamming, radar, even cryptography and
| information security.
|
| Sure: these electronics in WW2 were pretty bad by modern
| standards. But they were still electronics and computers and
| integral to both the Pacific and European theaters. I'd argue
| that cryptography and code-breaking is one of the highest forms
| of electronic warfare, its practically the invention of the
| information-security fields (HTTPS, SSL, TLS, etc. etc.) that
| we use to... well... chat on Hacker News, among other things.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Luckily there are some good links to 'proper' PDF sources, e.g.
| [0]
|
| [0] https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-
| op...
| hughrr wrote:
| I really like this content but the medium and presentation
| destroys it.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Beats having to jump on a plane and visit a military archive.
| hughrr wrote:
| Bit of html with some img tags beats both.
| rexreed wrote:
| I've been seeing increasing use of the phrase: TT;DR (Twitter
| Thread, Didn't Read). I'd like to understand what motivates
| people to publish content like this in numbered Twitter threads
| instead of blog posts. Is it because of the virality of
| twitter? Is it because it's easier to write or read snippet
| bites of text and images? Is it because they don't have a
| blogging platform? Is it something to do with comments or
| sharing? For those that write and prefer Twitter threads - what
| motivates that style instead of blog posts?
| Swizec wrote:
| Nobody clicks on links (and the algorithm deemphasizes them).
| People want to read content natively without leaving the app.
|
| So if you want reads, you gotta share natively on whatever
| platform you like to use.
|
| The pros use a strategy where they write long cornerstone
| content then post insightful abstracts on various platforms
| natively. Super pros use interns/agencies to do the chopping
| and sharing.
| rexreed wrote:
| Why are people preferring to read content on Twitter to
| begin with? I never go to Twitter as my primary source to
| read or learn about something. But maybe I'm unusual, and
| perhaps the current mode is scrolling thru stuff, reading
| stuff in short snippets, and never clicking links to read
| in more details.
| joshmlewis wrote:
| Twitter has really become a platform for professionals to
| make a name for themselves in a relatively short time period.
| There's also a general trend the past few years of society
| pushing people to build a community (followers, subscribers,
| etc) online using whatever niche skills they have. I've seen
| it over and over in the real estate / SMB side of Twitter in
| the past year. Someone talks about the secrets of the storage
| rental business, laundry mat business, or house cleaning
| business using threads and they're able to gain a "community"
| of followers relatively quickly and then a few months later
| capitalize on it with intros or selling a course. So back to
| the original question, I believe the reasoning for people to
| publish stuff like this on Twitter is to build up a following
| and their public presence.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The third largest US military expense in WW2 was on computers
| both mechanical and electronic. The US perfecting the proximity
| fuse was probably one of the single most important advancements
| during the war and was a major factor as to why allied artillery
| was so much more effective.
|
| I wonder how many people realize that artillery shells in WW2 had
| bloody vacuum tubes in them, or that the US had targeting
| computers for their naval AA guns that (combined with proximity
| fuses) lowered the average the rounds per kill from a few 1000's
| to under 100... by the end of the war US naval AA could shoot
| down a Japanese aircraft with an average of 30 rounds fired.
|
| The Brits weren't too shabby either, Bletchley Park the Chain
| Home early warning radar and much more. In fact the Brits pretty
| much invented modern radar...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-controlled_intercepti...
|
| The truth was that Germans really didn't managed to compete with
| the Allies when it came to technology despite the popular
| depiction of them in some circles of popular culture.
|
| They Nazi's "dejewification" of science and the pursuit of
| "German science" reeked havoc within their scientific community
| breaking down the scientific method and its core institutions and
| many of the scientists from the Great War and interwar period who
| remained either weren't supporting the German war machine or were
| actively sabotaging it.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| Could you link to anything about the vacuum tubes? I am one of
| the people that didn't realize that was a thing.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze
| mzs wrote:
| You can see in the diagrams toward the end that likely four
| tubes per fuze were used in WWII.
|
| https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm
| mvcalder wrote:
| If you visit Massachusetts, and go to Battleship Cove
| (https://www.battleshipcove.org/) in Fall River, inside the USS
| Massachusetts you can get up close and personal with a WWII era
| firing control computer. It looks both very sophisticated and
| antiquated at the same time.
| mzs wrote:
| _VT Fuzes For Projectiles and Spin-Stabilized Rockets_ , OP
| 1480, 1946
|
| https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm
| chernevik wrote:
| Also, the deployment of radar, which (among other things)
| played a large role in finding German U-boats.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Yep probably one of the most important and under discussed
| military operations of the war was one without a single
| bullet fired
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > They Nazi's "dejewification" of science and the pursuit of
| "German science" reeked havoc within their scientific
| community...
|
| _Wreaked_ havoc. It also "reeked" (stunk). So what you said,
| while it was a mistake, it was also perfect.
| pjc50 wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the shells with the tiny radar set for
| proximity triggering were only for AA use - and there were
| strict orders to only use them over water to make sure no dud
| shells were recovered and reverse-engineered, since the
| advantage they gave was so huge.
|
| It was an incredible achievement to fit a battery and some
| _glass_ vacuum tubes into a device that would be fired out of a
| gun at 1000G.
|
| I would also attribute some success to the Allied choice of
| pragmatic effectiveness over technical superiority most of the
| time. This allowed the effective arming of a huge force over a
| huge area with adequate replacements, whereas the "superweapon"
| approach fell to limited availability of parts and special
| alloys (due to Allied targeted bombing!). And the V2 program
| was a huge waste of resources for Germany. Good for the
| subsequent American space programme, though.
| danielvf wrote:
| You were right that it was just AA for most of the war, due
| to the desire for secrecy, but starting at the battle of the
| Bulge in late 1944, proximity fuses were used by US
| artillery, on land.
|
| Otherwise, I strongly agree with you.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| It wasn't just secrecy it was also production capacity
| pretty much as soon as they could produce enough of them
| they started to use them on land as well. The proximity
| fuse was key to the US war in the pacific as well.
|
| It's probably the main reason for why the US has dominated
| the electronics industry through the 20th century. The
| miniaturization required and the ability to mass produce
| electronics required the development of new production
| techniques. The proximity fuse was the first use of PCBs in
| mass production.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The science behind building a proximity fuze in 1942 is just
| mind boggling. Even though they infinite money at their
| disposal it's still insane that they were able to computerize
| a shell moving with 16,000-20,000 G-Forces in the days of
| vacuum tubes.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The proximity fuse was used at the battle of the bulge
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze
|
| However they did tried to avoid them being captured by the
| Germans.
|
| The proximity shells for AA guns were so sensitive that they
| with the help of targeting computers allowed the Brits to
| essentially neutralize V-1 attacks as they could effectively
| shoot down all incoming V-1's.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Artillery was where the US had a real qualitative edge in
| WWII. There were the radio equipped forward observers that
| could call in a barrage with drastically lower latency than
| any other combatant. There were the computer generated
| firing tables aiding both accuracy and allowing things like
| time on target barrages[1]. And towards the end there were
| the proximity fused shells.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_On_Target
| 62951413 wrote:
| "didn't manage to compete"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262? the V-2?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 ? The A-bomb seems
| to be the only technology they failed to build. But it played
| no role on the European theatre in WWII anyway. Don't forget
| that American reliance on foreigners led directly to leaking
| the atomic secrets to the Soviets.
| rjsw wrote:
| One of my grandfathers was working for Metrovick [1] at the
| start of the 30s. His boss suggested that he go get a PhD and
| hopefully there would be more work when he had finished. He
| chose to go to Aachen [2] and learned German well enough to get
| his Dr Ing.
|
| Back at Metrovick he worked on high power radio transmitters,
| one he designed for the Rugby Radio Station [3] became the
| basis of the one for the Chain Home system and he was in charge
| of production of them by Metrovick.
|
| Because he spoke German he was a member of the Allied Control
| Commission immediately after the war and went round all the
| German electronics companies to find out what they had been
| doing. He found that he knew all the senior people who had been
| working on competing technology from when they had been
| students together.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan-Vickers [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technische_Hochschule,_Aachen [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_Radio_Station
| ckozlowski wrote:
| I'm really interested to read this, but good gosh, do I despise
| al this working going into something as inaccessible for long
| form as Twitter.
|
| As an aside however, when I saw this topic, I immediately thought
| of Steve Blank's website, who goes into quite a great deal of
| depth on the history of Electronic Warfare and how Silicon Valley
| rose from the WWII infrastructure created for it. He has a number
| of articles here: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ If you
| like this topic, you'll find those to be a good read.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| It would have been interesting if there were any detail about the
| effects of the jamming on the ground. Did they actually interfere
| with communication or tactics much?
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(page generated 2021-12-30 23:01 UTC)